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Advertising
and Commodity Culture
in Joyce
by Garry Leonard
Order
this Book now
Garry Leonard looks in detail at
Joyce’s representation of a phenomenon that dominates the contemporary
landscape: advertising. Taking readers back to its beginnings, Leonard shows
that advertising was a central preoccupation of Joyce, one that helps us unravel
his often difficult style.
Building on the work of cultural theorists like Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard,
Irigiray, and others, Leonard examines commodity culture in Joyce's work and
demonstrates the ways in which characters use (or are used by) modern
advertising techniques to make their own identities more intelligible and to
fill the Lacanian "permanent lack" of modern identity.
The commonality of religion and advertising, the use of "kitsch" as a
rhetorical device, the commodity market's exploitation of the proletariat, the
role of pornography, the impact of advertising's "normative" modes of
dress and behavior, and the role of the modern city as a modernist trope are all
explored as aspects of Joyce's work or as pressures faced by his characters. As
Leonard demonstrates, "culture" in Joyce is the product of a complex
response to psychological, sociological, political, economic, and aesthetic
pressures. In Joyce, advertising, as a product of that culture, serves both to
reinforce the hegemonic discourse of the day and to subvert it.
Excellent work has been done on aspects of commodity culture in Joyce by writers
as diverse as Bonnie Kime Scott, Jennifer Wicke, and Brandon Kershner (Joyce
and Popular Culture, UPF, 1996), but Leonard's is the first comprehensive
study of Joyce and the advertising/commodity nexus, certain to be of equal
interest to students and scholars of Joyce, modernism, and cultural studies.
Garry Leonard is associate professor of English at the
University of Toronto and author of Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian
Perspective (1993).
The Florida James Joyce Series
1998. 224 pp. 6 X 9.
Bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1632-0
Cloth, $49.95s
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"Fascinating and original. . . , Leonard casts new light on how the apparently transitory objects and discourses of an emerging consumer society in fact shape the subjectivity and realities of Joyce's characters."--
James Joyce Literary Supplement
"An important contribution to modernist scholarship. . . . Leonard has written a remarkably lively, intelligent, and enthusiastic treatment of a key aspect of modern social life. Indeed, the book's value transcends the narrow field of Joyce scholarship; anyone interested in modernism, consumerism, or popular culture will be enriched and enlightened by this first-rate study."--
Modern Fiction Studies
"An important study of the relationship of Joyce's work to the commodity culture of which they are, in a sense, one product."-- South Atlantic Review
"The first comprehensive study of
Joyce and the advertising/commodity nexus. . . . Provides the
next step in understanding Joyce--for which Joyceans worldwide
are ready and waiting. And it does so eloquently and persuasively
and in enormously careful detail and depth of vision. . . . I
love this book; I learned from this book. . . . An up-to-date and
dramatically useful inquiry into Joycean modernism."--Cheryl
Herr, University of Iowa
"The best book on Joyce I have read in years. . . .
[Leonard] offers new insights, novel readings, and creative
interpretations on every page, and all in a brilliantly funny,
irreverent prose which captures the moment or the character like
a Joycean epiphany."--Zack Bowen
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